I’m really loving Apple, today.
I never thought I’d get so excited about an official firmware update, but version 1.5 for my second generation iPod is terrific. The fact that you can configure what appears on the top level menu is great. I have trouble getting certain kinds of calendar items to show up on my iPod, and some of my contacts come out funny, so I ditched “Extras”, but put the clock at the top menu, since I use it all the time. I also only use “Albums” and “Playlists” for browsing my music collection, so I put them right at the top menu, and hid everything else. Now that I walk to work, its a pain digging through a huge collection. Apple’s new firmware moves the stuff I use up about two-clicks.
The rest of my Apple love is dedicated to the creaky G4 sitting in a closet at home. I pulled a couple of 20G hard drives out of storage yesterday, along with a gig of old PC100 RAM. A quick test of my work machine confirms that these guys are happy to boot with no display, keyboard or mouse, and OSXVNC is up and ready to serve a desktop in about a minute. I should be able to stick a headless G4 on my home network with no trouble!
I was cleaning up some books I want to donate to Goodwill, or the library, and noticed a bookmark in one. Let me share with you the quote I’d underlined. Its from “The Money Advisor” by Bruce Cohen:
The point of the exercise is not to amass a huge mountain of money, but rather to be able to buy the goods and services you find meaningful.
Mark that last word: meaningful. Not fun for a bit, not status-building, but meaningful. Good advice.
There’s a well-worn saw you will hear more than once if you’re searching for your vocation: “To find your passion, go out into the world and notice what you notice.”
Hoary as that saying is, its on the money. You will naturally be drawn to things that matter to you. Maybe its that you can’t look away from a homeless person. Maybe you stop and peer in the window of upscale furniture shops. Maybe you went to Mexico, and just could leave without buying a jipijapa because the story of how weaving hats is a dying art. All these things could point to a leaning in you that, if followed, could lead you to your calling.
So what does this have to do with del.icio.us? Your del.iciou.us (or spurl, or furl) bookmarks are a record of those things which you have noticed online. I’m inclined to believe that the developers Extisp.icio.us had this in mind. Extisp.icio.us charts your tags, making those with more links blacker, bolder and bigger giving you a nice overview of the kinds of things that you link up most often.
This isn’t a perfect overview of your interests. For example, chances are good that your tags will be skewed towards technology. You can break it yourself if you, like I did, try and come up with more generic tags. But if you haven’t been keeping score up until now, this tool may give you a quick hit insight into your interests that can fuel some deeper searching.
Brendon at the Slacker Manager has very kindly linked up my GMail Journal post. (As has Lifehacker. Its exciting when your writing grows legs.)
Apparently Exchange doesn’t play nice with appending “+whatever” to your username. If you’re on an Exchange server, you could borrow a method I’ve used at a few of my employers to simplify auto-sorting mail. We prepend the subjects of messages with the docket number of the project to which the mail refers. So if you want to tell me about new documents for a project with the docket AAA 001, your mail would have the subject “[AAA001] New documentation on server”. I would have a rule that automagically sorts that to my AAA001 folder, and depending on the urgency of the project either removes the unread flag, or notifies me your message arrived.
You could set up your journal in Outlook by replacing that docket number with your journal categories. You could even use a tool like AutoHotKeys to create shortcuts that are expanded for you if you got sick of typing the journal entry categories.
I don’t know enough about advanced Outlook to come up with anything more sophisticated than this, but sometimes there’s beauty in simplicity.
Incidentally, if your company hasn’t picked up on something like the docket number tags, and you communicate primarily by email, do everyone a favour and get this system in place.
Back when I still had a Mac, I played around a bit with the Humane Text service. This is a program that converts selections formatted in Markdown to HTML.
(Markdown, if you can’t be bothered to follow the link above, is a human-readable markup inspired by how people “markup” text in plaintext emails.)
I found this particularly useful when I was coding sites, and we’d got to the interminable dump-text-into-templates phase.
I hadn’t found any equivalent for Windows until I was pointed to this post at this is sippey.
Inspired, I hacked together a batch file which I documented in the comments thread. I’ll share this whole process with you here, though.
Install Cygwin, making sure you get perl. Then create a batch file with the following text:
@echo off
C:\cygwin\bin\getclip.exe | C:\cygwin\bin\perl.exe C:\cygwin\home{usr}\bin\Markdown.pl | C:\cygwin\bin\perl.exe C:\cygwin\home{usr}\bin\Smartypants.pl | C:\cygwin\bin\putclip.exe
That second bit is one long line. Edit paths as necessary.
Now, copy a section of markup source, and run this batch file. The contents of your clipboard will be converted into HTML!
Next step: use AutoHotKey to convert a selection in-place, much like the behaviour of the Humane Text service.
I was recently inspired by a post that Merlin Mann had created on 43 Folders about using a web based mail account as a “punching bag“. Remembering an old skool Gmail tip about keeping notes in your mail account, I thought these two ideas could combine nicely to allow you to use Gmail as a personal journal.
Read the rest of this entry »
I’m quite unable to come up with anything to write about today. So I leave you with this:
I spent the afternoon musing on Life. If you come to think of it, what a queer thing Life is! So unlike anything else, don’t you know, if you see what I mean. – PG Wodehouse
My mum called me on Saturday and told me to come a little early for dinner on Saturday, and bring my camera. She and dad met me at the streetcar stop, and we walked down to the beach where a combination of high wind and high waves had built these amazing mini-glaciers. I shot 80 pics on my digital camera before my batteries gave out.
You can see my favourite shots in my newly-minted flickr account, where a lack of understanding of the client software means I’ve provided you with images you could print on the side of a bus.